Bad People (23 page)

This last part broke everyone but S/D up, shaming Kim into hysterics. Kim hid her face in her hands, and then folded over, trying to bury her head beneath her lap. This just made the other girls laugh harder. She jumped up, and bolted from the room.

Morse, barely able to get the words out, because he was convulsing with laughter said, “That’s Steve-Dave’s effect on women.”

“I wish you’d saved some weed for me,” said S/D, remarking on all the ridiculous guffawing going on.

The laughter ebbed and flowed several more rounds before they subsided from exhaustion.

After a beat of silence, S/D asked, “Isn’t anyone going to go see how she is?”

The unnamed girl snorted. Jane, who had fallen back laughing on the couch, now put her feet up and shoved those boxy shoes into S/D’s flank. “Go on,” she said. “
You’re
somebody, bitch.”

After another moment of her pushing, S/D shook his head. He stood up. “Fuck you guys,” he said.

“Oooh!” said Jane.

S/D went to find Kim.

She was in the back of the house, out a doorway, onto a porch. Her back was to the sliding door and when S/D opened it, she started. Now he wondered whether it was a smart idea to talk to her or not, but now that she had been made aware of him, he could hardly double back, so he went out.

He nodded at her and she nodded back. He didn’t know what to say, and didn’t know why he should have to say anything really, but it was always that way. Always him who had to speak. “So,” he said. “Those guys are assholes.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“I’m S/D,” he said.

She waved briefly, indicating she already knew, he guessed.

“Kim,” she said.

That was out of the way. There was a bench in the yard and he asked her if she wanted to sit. They sat.

He suddenly felt at a loss of what to say next. He usually handled himself well enough in social situations, but this one was fraught with expectations he couldn’t get a handle on.

Finally, she spoke first. “This is stupid,” she said.

“Yep,” he said.

She lifted her hands up, covered in her long flannel shirt, and dropped them back to her sides. “I’m just going to go home.”

“Oh yeah?”

She exhaled violently. “Yeah! I suppose!”

“Okay.”

“Are you a virgin?” she said out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“No. I don’t…What are you talking about?”

“Am I so disgusting?”

He tried to take it all in, but before he could she moved toward him, half rising from the bench to reach him, she kissed him open-mouthed. Her tongue felt cold. She arraigned herself on her knees on the bench. After he recovered from the shocked, he started kissing back, even as he shifted his gaze as much as he could toward the sliding glass door to see if Morse was taping or something. In case he was being punked.

No one there. She was leaning too far on top of him, over-excited, just about pushing him into the naked hard arm rail of the bench, which dug into his spine. She was eager, but not too skilled. Finally he had to push her away for a minute to catch his breath.

“Calm down,” he said reflexively, not meaning it to sound harsh. She rocked back, and he wasn’t even sure if she heard him; she threw her leg over and straddled his lap. This what not what he wanted to be involved in at all, this girl was somehow into him, but she didn’t even know him. But how to tell her this without sounding stupid?

“Lets go inside,” she said. She jumped up and he followed.

The lights were off in the front of the house now, and the others had evidently paired off somewhere. She led him to a bedroom. The other girl and boy, that is, not Morse and Jane, were already in there on the bed, clothes half-off. They didn’t even look up.

Morse and Jane were someplace further down the hall; S/D could hear them fucking.

They found another bedroom. Empty.

Kim kneeled in front of S/D and started working his belt. Her hands were shaking and she fumbled, and he fought to help; by the time they got his pants open he thought he was about to burst through them anyway. He should stop her. He didn’t know her and he didn’t particularly want to know her. If he had an ounce of integrity, and pity for her ridiculous crush, he would stop her. Hadn’t he been there a thousand times himself? He had the crushes. He loved girls; they didn’t love him.

She looked up at him. A single light from the hallway shining through the open door caught the glint of her eyes, not enough light to betray what color her eyes were. She put her hand around him, and then her mouth, but only for an instant. Then she backed away and murmured something.

“What?” he said, not sure he had heard what he had thought he heard, as if he dreamed it.

“Murdered,” she said. “Your Dad was murdered! Killed!”

That was it. She was crazy and that explained everything. That should’ve been his cue to button his pants up and walk away. In fact, it should have made it impossible for him to continue. It didn’t.

Somehow it made it easier.

Chapter 25: Barry

Earlier that evening, humiliated in front of Erika and Glen when he had to return to the restaurant without Connie, Barry had insisted on going back to see the second half of
The Aeneid
with them anyway. He barely registered what happened on stage for the next half hour, sulking, fuming, his face burning in the dark as he sat hyper-conscious, Connie’s now vacant seat separating him and the other couple. Erika, he could feel, was angry with him, or with someone. This too incensed him. They had had words at the restaurant after Connie had stormed out. Erika was clearly reinventing the past; they had made the plan to give Connie her bad news at dinner together but, now that
that
plan had blown up, Erika was clearly disposed to, instead, drop all the blame for it into Barry’s convenient lap.
Good old Barry: how the ladies do love to walk all over you
, he thought to himself. The Greeks and Trojans had had it right, long ago. They confined their women to weeping over their men when they did. And the world was still that way up until the day his father died. His mother had been there to cry when his father died. She hadn’t actually cried, but she’d been there; they were partnered for life. A man was a man and a woman was a woman in their generation. Of course you couldn’t say that out loud today. Who would cry for Barry when he died?

Months had passed and nothing had worked. If anything he was more invisible to Connie now than before. And he had solved all her problems.

It was him the police harassed; him that dealt with the bankruptcy and the impossible Erika. He had even tried to be a role model for Stephen-David and, Lord knows, the boy needed it. His father had neglected him, and now his mother seemed to be doing the same. He ran around at night. These parents today, they keep their kids tethered to their sides for the first twelve years, but when they get to high school it’s anything goes. As if they are afraid their own kids would think them uncool. Different when he was young. He was beaten with a belt when he deserved it and it kept him in line, so now as an adult he knew how to behave. These kids like Stephen-David ran around, never a hand laid on them, and they don’t know the first thing about politeness, or civility.

Barry was really only getting to know Connie for real now. Crises revealed people.

Connie had run away when she was a kid. Now Barry understood his mother’s dislike of her. Connie’s parents were practically hippies his mother had told him, and that is why she ran off to California (
San Francisco
, wasn’t it?) and lived with the gays and the drug abusers and the pornographers. Then she came back and took up with Robb and look what he turned out to be: a gambler who left his family and business bankrupt. And women went for his type every time, not the good guys like Barry.

The one thing he had ever done in his life to stand up for himself and he couldn’t tell anybody.

He realized his attention had drifted from the play and that he was lost. Barry watched as one actor’s line, bellowed out of his throat, was accompanied by a spray of saliva caught naked in the light. They sprayed each other when they talked; how could they stand it? He wondered which actors hated each other, which ones were liars, which were fucking, or had fucked, and who had cheated on who. Who needed a script, really? All the same, story or no story. People shitting on each other.

Barry got out of his seat without a look at Erika or Glen. They probably assumed he was going to the bathroom or something, but he was leaving, to the annoyance of other audience members in the row, who had to shuffle and squirm to make room for his passing. Well it wasn’t his fault, the rows were ridiculously narrow—to cram more seats in, no doubt. Much worse than a movie theater. He moved through to the aisle, nearly tripping over one person, and catching himself on the arm of the next chair over. He took that moment to look back at Erika and Glen and gain some satisfaction at their certainly shocked expressions, surreptitiously. Incredibly, they weren’t watching him. They were watching the play.

He went up the aisle, and people here did watch him, as if his movements were their business. He pushed through the doors to the lobby, which was completely empty but for two youngsters attending the merchandise table. There were no ushers to be seen. Almost as if the theater were closed, except that the voices of the actors leaked out, muffled, from its interior. He looked at the two stiff and bored merch sellers who looked back at him with unbroken gazes, as if he was some curious artifact. This made him feel self-conscious and he fought the urge to pat himself to see if something was askew.

Recovering, he pushed himself forward, out the lobby doors and onto the sidewalk. The air was fresh and quiet. He loosened his tie and then undid his top button. That felt good. He undid all his buttons, letting the cool night air kiss his damp undershirt. He slipped off his jacket, letting it fall to the sidewalk. His white shirt came next. Untucking it, then removing it felt exhilarating. The damp t-shirt, flimsy as soap film, came off, then he pushed himself out of the too-tightly-laced shoes. He always tied his laces tight, and tied them and retied then as they worked loose throughout the day. He usually found red marks on his swollen feet at the end of any day, but he could never stop the habit.

He kicked the shoes away. He had never stood on a sidewalk in only his socks before. The concrete felt cool and alive. Slightly uneven. It had contours, he discovered.

He unsnapped his pants and let them fall free. He pushed his boxers down and stepped out of all the mess of piling clothes. Now all that restricted him were his socks. His socks and the red cummerbund—the first he’d ever worn, encircling his middle like a life-ending wound. He started to push it down too, but the cheap clasp, ragged as a broken razor, started slicing his skin vertical. He reached around for its clasp but couldn’t open it. He tried to fight with the thing, stretch it out, pull it up and over his head. It got twisted in his hair, which he had kept meaning to cut but hadn’t, since spring or sometime. The clasp caught his hair and he cried in pain and it pulled, but he ripped the cummerbund free and threw it into the street.

Not a car had passed. The other side of the street was quiet—that was the transit station, underused that time of night. He was standing naked and free, feeling the cool breath of night air on his salty skin, and only a couple blocks from downtown. The wind was coming from the other direction. Which way to go? Into the wind or into the night throng downtown?

He caught movement in his peripheral vision. He jumped involuntarily when he discovered the pair from the merchandise concession inside, standing at the glass foyer doors looking at him. They were holding their phones. He realized what he had been doing, bent down, scooped up his clothing and ran away. Out of their sight, he scrambled to cover himself, dropping everything in a new pile again, leaving the underwear and pulling on his pants, and his jacket without his shirt. He slipped the shoes on sockless and started walking, leaving the rest of his things where they lay. He was shaking. The police would love to get their hands on him, and he’d given them the chance.

He had bolted in the direction opposite the parking lot that held his car; now he had to loop all the long way around a very long block, up a steep hill, no less, and back. In all that time he heard no sirens, so the kids evidently did not call the police. Or maybe the police didn’t use sirens for a call like that. He had the urge to slip back by the front of the theater, but resisted.

He got to his car, and dug his keys out of his pants.

He got in, started it, and drove off the parking lot.

He circled past the lobby slowly. There were no cops. He could see the kids back in the lobby now, behind their concession table where they belonged. They were both on their phones. Then it hit him. They were holding their phones before, yes, but they were holding them out, certainly not talking on them.

Of course. They weren’t calling the police. They were taking pictures. Now they were certainly on the phones with friends and having a wonderful time telling all about the hairy freak in front of the Paramount.